The most successful hotel restaurants make you feel as if you aren’t in a hotel at all

On 4 May, London’s Claridge’s hotel posted a picture of the main restaurant to their Instagram account, celebrating Star Wars Day. It featured some of their restaurant staff, who have been feeding NHS workers housed there during the current crisis, dressed as socially distanced stormtroopers, with a sign reading “May the force be with you.” It made me smile. Indeed, it struck me that, despite having eaten in that dining room many times throughout its various incarnations, this was the most fun I’d ever seen anyone having there.

Ah, the hotel restaurant: the hospitality business’s version of the casino slot machine. You never know whether it will deliver, but you keep pulling on the handle hopefully. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve eaten very good things in restaurants located within hotels. Earlier this year, I delivered one long wet-lipped eulogy for a dish served in that very Claridge’s space, which is currently Davies and Brook, from chef Daniel Humm of Eleven Madison Park in New York. He has brought with him his dry-aged duck breast with a sweet-sour, blood-enriched sauce. It was love at first lick.

A year before, at Gridiron, inside the sleek Metropolitan Hotel just off Park Lane, I was thrilled by a cast iron pot of silky mashed potato enriched with pokey Tunworth cheese, trotter jus and pork crackling. (No, you’ve got high cholesterol.) I was charmed by the kooky sleight of hand of Heston Blumenthal’s “meat fruit”, the smoothest of chicken liver parfaits fashioned to look like a mandarin because it was on the menu at Dinner inside the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, Knightsbridge. There was the lip-smacking beef cheek dish cooked for me by James Martin during one memorable night at the Talbot Hotel in Malton, Yorkshire, and the indecently tumescent raspberry soufflé at the Pompadour by Galvin inside the then Caledonian Hotel, Edinburgh.

But great food, delivered by waiters doing their very best, is not the same as a restaurant at ease with itself. Too often they come across as those overly tight, crotch-creviced jeans worn by your 60-year-old head teacher at the weekend: a really bad fit. One of my first experiences of a hotel restaurant in this job was at the Connaught Hotel in 2001 when it was a glowering, deep-varnished museum piece, overseen by the impeccably toqued French chef Michel Bourdin. I remember a terrine set in rubbery aspic flavoured with cloves, and an excruciating bill (made more so by my companion, a mighty English novelist, grandly ordering champagne for the whole table without bothering to check with the person handling the bill, ie me, that didn’t all go through on expenses.) It served the kind of food ex-boarding school boys like: mushroom and quail’s egg vol-au-vents, calf’s liver and bacon, roast lamb and so on. The waiters came in stiff-collared waves. At the Connaught you were never alone.

In 2001, Gordon Ramsay announced he was taking over the Claridge’s dining room. It was the start of a fierce land grab. He put his chefs into the Savoy and the Berkeley, the Marriott and, of course, the Connaught. Bourdin’s disciples rose up as quickly as their knees would allow them, and I laughed. This, I decided, was what London needed. In many ways, it really was. In came the interior designers with their mood boards and their colour swatches. It was a thrilling moment.

But quickly I realised these restaurants inside hotels weren’t quite living up to their billing. Instead of joy, you got stiff service, the whiff of closely managed artifice and a very big bill. Ramsay wanted his Claridge’s outpost to be a three-star companion to his flagship in Chelsea. It ended up feeling like his own tribute act. In too many instances the creation of what is meant to be a stand-alone restaurant with an identity separate to that of the hotel ends up as a desperate act of architectural misdirection; an attempt to convince you that the space was always meant to be this, and not the big echoing ballroom off to the left of the lobby which they didn’t quite have a use for.

Scanning the space occupied by the Soak at the Grosvenor Hotel in Victoria, I concluded the whole thing could be packed up and shifted out, re-flat-packed, in half a day. A benighted experiment in terrible tapas at the Ecclestone Square Hotel was ruined by lack of effort. They started vacuuming the carpets in the middle of lunch, then tested the fire alarm.

But there’s one element which sums up this problem more than any other: access to the bogs. They should be three steps away, through a door off the dining room. Most of the time in hotels, they are four corridors away, up two flights of stairs, in an annex, by the spa. I loved the cooking at Grazing by Mark Greenaway in the Waldorf Astoria in Edinburgh. But going for a wee took literally 10 minutes. My companion thought I’d done a runner. It could be worse and it has been. At the really fancy hotels the waiters, apparently embarrassed by the tortuous expedition, will take it upon themselves to accompany you. Oh God. What are you meant to say to a stranger while striding urgently towards the urinal? It’s the definition of an inconvenience.

Still, such things are worth enduring if you find a restaurant you really like. The problem is, most are run on a contract basis. It gets into its stride, then the hotel changes its priorities and bang, it’s gone. Farewell Brasserie Chavot at the Westbury. Your soft-shell crabs were delicious while they lasted.

But I said early on that, for now, this column would accentuate the positive, so let me big up the ones that get it right. I’ve been a cheerleader for the Game Bird at the Stafford Hotel before and will now cheerlead again. It works, I think, because they don’t pretend to be anything other than what they are: a restaurant which happens to be located in the hotel’s lounges. Plus, they have a smoked salmon trolley and a cracking beef suet pudding.

The Holborn Dining Rooms, with chef Calum Franklin’s monumental pie action, feels like it just happens to be adjacent to, rather than part of the Rosewood Hotel. Did I mention the pies? And there’s Min Jiang, the glamorous Chinese with great-value Peking duck, on the top floor of the Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington. That works because, when you enter via the lift, you feel like you aren’t in a hotel. And that’s exactly what you want from a hotel restaurant.

News bites

Chef Carl Clarke of the quality fried chicken group Chick ‘N’ Sours has launched a £50,000 crowdfunder to raise cash for the launch of Future Noodles, a nutritionally complete, plant-based instant noodle pot that won’t make you hate yourself. ‘Working long shifts in the kitchen, my late-night snack would always be Japanese instant noodles and as banging as they tasted, I knew they weren’t good for me,’ Clarke has said. These are his answer. For every pot bought when they come to market, another will be donated to a good cause.

The quality meat suppliers Northfield Farm, well known for their stand at London’s Borough Market, has extended its delivery options. As well as a UK-wide courier service and delivery in London, customers within five miles of their farm in Rutland can now get free delivery. Those within five to 15 miles get free delivery on orders over £45.

And now a quick roundup of signs of life from the high streets. Wagamama is reopening 67 branches for takeaway and delivery. The coffee and patisserie chain Paul has introduced click and collect for 12 stores in London. Honest Burgers is reopening the majority of its 38 branches nationwide for delivery. And in Copenhagen, chef Rene Redzepi’s world famous Noma has temporarily reinvented itself as a takeaway burger bar.

Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1